So it has finally arrived from Amazon. Expert F# by Don Syme, Adam Granicz & Antonio Cisternino. I got a note from the post office yesterday that I needed to collect a package from their offices. After paying a 10% customs fee (that I wasn’t expecting) I had my new Yellow & Black F# Book… it’s so shinny. Trust my luck though – I have a few university assignments due this week as well as a crazy week of work so it has been sitting on my desk for a day and I haven’t managed to get into it. ......

For a few years now I have been looking for effective ways to be involved in the “community”. While there are a few community programming events in my area (Johannesberg), there isn’t too much face to face stuff – which has caused me to turn to the internet. My internet attempts have been varied – at first I took the passive approach of listening to tech podcasts. This was great for a while, but soon the content became semi-repetitive and a little boring. It seemed that the podcasts I was listening ......

So I am half way through dev days in Johannesburg. It has been quite an interesting day… Maybe it is me, but this year it hasn’t been as OMG as at previous conferences. A few things that stood out though… 1) This is the first time I have had to queue in a line to use the gents toilets before – yes, a true sign that we are at a typically male dominated industry event in this country – the men’s toilets were jam packed – the ladies if there were any there didn’t have a problem. 2) Bart De Smet presentation ......

So some more basics… One of the things you will be taught at any college after conquering arrays is different derivatives of collections. Stack is one of the simplest of those and very useful… A stack is a LIFO (last in first out) data structure and has at least two basic method calls – push & pop. Push, “pushes” an item on the top of the stack. Pop, removes the top most item off the stack. Because all elements on a stack are of the same type, one can use an array to implement a stack or a linked ......

I spent a few hours scratching my head on this one... So I thought I would blog about it in case someone else had the same headache. Assume you have a class, and you are wanting to use the INotifyPropertyChanged interface so that when you bind to an instance of the class, you get the magic sauce of binding to do you updates to the UI. Well, I had a special instance where I wanted one of the properties of the class to add some additional formatting to itself whenever someone changed its value (see ......

General Every time I go back to university I find myself wading through sorting algorithms and their implementation in C++. Up to now I haven’t really appreciated their true value. However as I discovered this last week with Dictionaries in C# – having a knowledge of some basic programming principles can greatly improve the performance of a system and make one think twice about how to tackle a problem. I’m going to cover briefly in this post the following: Selection Sort Insertion Sort Shellsort ......

So I have been battling around with F# for a few weeks and it has been frustrating just getting my brain around the syntax etc. Then someone put a comment on my blog that I should check out the following online book called the F# Survival Guide. I highly recommend those wanting to get into the basics of the language to go through this resource. It is easy to understand, especially for someone coming from a C# background. Give it a read… it gets a two thumbs up from me ......

General This may sound like a typical noob statement, but I’m finding out in a very real way that just because you have a solution to a problem, doesn’t necessarily mean it is the best solution. This was reiterated to me when a friend of mine suggested I look at using Dictionaries instead of Lists for a particular problem – he was right, I have always just assumed that because lists solved my problem I did not need to look elsewhere. So my new manifesto to counter this ageless problem is as follows… ......

My brain still thinks in C#!!! I have been looking at F# and trying to figure out the basics of it, but all the time in the back of my mind I am going – what is the C# equivalent to this or that… It’s frustrating because I almost want a F# to C# dictionary the whole time – and simply translate my C# code to F# – which would negate the main motivation for learning F# – as I want learn functional programming - if I was simply doing C# code in a F# syntax I would be gaining nothing! So I am experiencing ......

So… I am a C# coder at heart, but F# is starting to fascinate me. Today I thought I would try and figure out the basics of getting the two languages to talk to each other. From what I could tell on Stack Overflow, at least for now there will not be any Windows Forms / WPF exposed to F# (it is possible, but I am lazy and like VS to do as much as possible). Which leaves me thinking, where will I use F#. I can immediately see a use for it in the Business Layer of my applications – which would mean that ......

I recently watched “An Introduction to Microsoft F#” on Channel 9. I would say this is one of the best overviews of the F# language that I have seen and really puts things into perspective. I have been playing around with the basics of the language, but just didn’t get it… I don’t know if I am getting it now… but my mindset has changed. Do yourself a favour – if you want to see F# in action then watch this video. There are a few things in the video that Luca demonstrated that I would like to make ......